Modern personal computer systems are often characterized by a main computer, or host device, to which one or more peripheral devices may be coupled. Typical peripheral devices that may be used in such a system include keyboards, pointing devices, monitors, printers, mass storage devices, and audio or visual input/output devices. Generally, for any particular peripheral device, the main computer must be programmed with special software that permits the main computer to communicate with the peripheral device--this software is often referred to as the device driver for the peripheral device.
Many computer systems rely upon the user to manually load the appropriate device drivers whenever a new peripheral device is connected to the main processing system. This approach places an undesirable burden upon the user. In other cases, a computer system might be sold to the user with a number of device drivers already installed. Some of those drivers may simply reside in memory without being used if the corresponding peripheral devices are not purchased or are simply not connected by the user, thus wasting valuable memory space. This approach becomes especially undesirable as the number of different peripheral devices which could potentially be used with the computer system increases. A third approach which avoids this type of waste is to pre-load the appropriate driver into a non-volatile memory within the peripheral device; the main computer could then load the appropriate driver from the peripheral device when the peripheral device is connected to the system. This approach has the disadvantage, however, of requiring additional memory space to be provided in the peripheral device, which adds to the cost of the device.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a technique by which the appropriate drivers for all peripheral devices connected to a computer system are automatically installed in the computer system. It is further desirable that only those device drivers for peripheral devices that are actually connected are so installed, so as to avoid unnecessary consumption of memory in the computer system. It is further desirable that such a technique avoid storing device drivers on individual peripheral devices.